Tuesday, November 10, 2015

New movie review: Spotlight

The team comes together in writer-director Tom McCarthy's masterful Spotlight.

Spotlight is an
American masterpiece. As a journalist, the true story of the Boston Globe’s
investigative reporting team uncovering the Catholic Church sex abuse scandal
fills me with pride. As a human, however, it fills me with shame and disgust.
This is among the darkest chapters in our shared cultural history, and it is
ongoing. Every day in every part of the world, new victims come forward, and we
are confronted with the painful reality of a system and a society that has
allowed this to continue.

The concerted effort to protect pedophile priests in the
Catholic Church has been described as a conspiracy of silence, but few can
agree on the members of the conspiracy. The church wants the public to believe
this is the work of “a few bad apples,” a phrase repeated throughout the film.
The evidence suggests the entire church is corrupt all the way to the top.
Common sense, however, tells us systems take their power from people – in this
case, the parishioners.

“If it takes a village to raise a child, then it takes a
village to abuse one,” says Mitchell Garabedian (Stanley Tucci), the lawyer for
the victims. Like that, we are all implicated. Even the venerable Globe is not
without blood on its hands as we learn the paper had the all the pieces needed
to break the story years before the Spotlight team but refused to put them
together. No one wants to acknowledge the abuse because to do so is to
recognize a fundamental flaw in ourselves. Knowing everything, we still did
nothing.

It is a common trick in movies like this to use one or two
people to represent large numbers of victims – the old adage, “One death is a
tragedy; a million is a statistic,” comes to mind. Writer-director Tom McCarthy
thankfully avoids this trap, and we watch the team interview survivor after
survivor after survivor, establishing both the pattern and scope of the abuse. They
are not just numbers. They are real people with families and friends and lives.
They feel regret and shame and anger, and we in the audience feel anger for
them as we come to know each and every one of them personally.

In an early sequence, expertly assembled by editor Tom
McArdle, the film cuts back and forth between interviews with two victims. Sacha
Pfeiffer (Rachel McAdams) speaks with a middle-aged gay man about his abuse at
the hands of a priest who earned his trust little by little before exploiting it.
At the same time, Mike Rezendes (Mark Ruffalo) hears the story of a younger,
married working-class man and the priest who abused him in the wake of his
father’s death.

These two men could not be more different, but their stories
are distressingly similar, to the point where one wonders if a priest’s copy of
the catechism comes with a handbook for abuse. We meet more survivors, whose
experiences differ in the details but the cumulative effect of which leads us
to only one conclusion. The church’s abuse robbed these people of their
innocence, their trust, and their faith in god, and the hypocrisy at the center
of it all is a legal and moral wrong that went willfully unchecked for too
long.

If this all sounds like a tragically bleak tale, it is, but
under the masterful direction of McCarthy, working from a script he co-wrote
with Josh Singer, it never feels like a slog. Quite the contrary. Spotlight is a riveting legal thriller
and excellent journalistic drama on par with the classic All the President’s Men. The film plays off the audience’s own
sense of right and wrong, and though we know the abuse will be brought to
light, we sit glued to our seats, breathlessly anticipating the moment when the
Globe fires the first shot to bring down this system.

Rachel McAdams, Michael Keaton, and Mark Ruffalo in Spotlight.

So few films understand the mechanics of journalism, and
even fewer seem to try. Spotlight,
for which McCarthy collaborated closely with the staff of the Globe, gets it.
This film knows what it is like to pore over the stacks in search of one piece
of information. This film knows what it is like to go door to door with a pad
and pencil in your hands, seeking answers from people who do not want to talk
to you. This film also knows an editor will get annoyed if you use “golf” as a
verb. The Globe in this movie has the feel of a real newsroom, and it is
refreshing to see that feeling accurately depicted on screen.

Moreover, the cast, which also worked closely with those being
portrayed, feels like a news team. In these people, I recognize the
personalities and professionals I have worked with throughout my career. Ruffalo
nails the style of a hard-nosed reporter who puts the story above all else.
Michael Keaton is perfect as Spotlight Editor Robby Robinson, who must at all
times keep the bigger picture in focus. John Slattery is great as Globe Editor
Ben Bradlee Jr., who knows how important it is to check every fact and cover
every base. McAdams, Tucci, Liev Schrieber, and Brian D’Arcy James are all
excellent, as well. This cast is perhaps the best evidence yet for the need of
an ensemble award at the Oscars.

They are helped by a tremendous screenplay that seems to
understand how each of these characters would speak. McCarthy and Singer shift
seamlessly from the heightened, condescending manner of the clergy to the workingman
vernacular of many of the victims, hitting every other level in between.
Compare that to something like an Aaron Sorkin script, in which every character
sounds as witty and didactic as Sorkin, and you understand how rare it is to
see real people interact how they might in life.

The film’s facility with language and understanding of human
connection should be no surprise, though, coming as it does from McCarthy,
whose filmography is full of compassionate, lonely people trying to find their
way in life. McCarthy is the same writer-director who brought us the excellent
trio of independent films The Station
Agent, The Visitor, and Win Win. Even his most recent effort,
the critically derided The Cobbler,
displays the same care for building character and motivation McCarthy has
always shown.

McCarthy is perhaps best recognized as an actor in films
such as Meet the Parents, Syriana, and Good Night and Good Luck or television shows such as The Wire and Boston Public. He was also nominated for an Academy Award for
co-writing Pixar’s magnificent Up. His
directorial efforts, however, have rarely garnered much attention, despite
being generally well liked. Spotlight
could change all that. McCarthy has deserved larger recognition for his work
behind the camera for years, and this should be movie that brings it to him.

While Spotlight is
a quintessentially American film, its story is global as we are reminded at the
end by a series of title cards listing the cities all over the world in which
major sex abuse scandals have been uncovered. One is too many. That the final
list names too many cities to count is disgraceful. Against this international
backdrop, the Globe’s victory in highlighting abuse in Boston parishes may seem
small, but its larger triumph is to force us to see what we would rather not.
Knowing what we know now, we can never look away again, and it is incumbent
upon us to pick up a torch, shine a light, and guide the way to providence.